Pet Peeves

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Set
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Set » 2012-05-11, 13:29

Sorry you're right about the 'f' in 'of', I pronounce it as a /v/. But the vowel in 'of' and 'off' are pronounced exactly the same, i.e. a short 'o'. The vowel in 'could've' is something like a schwa, maybe a really short schwa, but it isn't exactly the same sound as in 'the'.

So the difference between 'could of' and 'could've' is definitely audible from someone with my accent.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby ling » 2012-05-11, 13:36

Where I come from (Western US), "of" rhymes with "love". Different vowel from "off".
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby JackFrost » 2012-05-11, 19:40

loqu wrote:I revive this thread with another pet peeve of mine, people writing "looser" in English, when they actually mean "loser". This happens just too often.

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby ILuvEire » 2012-05-12, 0:23

I have a lot of typographic pet peeves. It irritates me to no end when people use a hyphen instead of an en-dash or an em-dash. It irritates me when people fuck around with typefaces--I don't want to see that ugly crap. It drives me crazy when people say things like "that book is mines" (GOD IT DRIVES ME UP A WALL. I feel so bad, because they should be able to say what they want, but it drives me insane).
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby lumiel » 2012-05-12, 8:00

ILuvEire wrote:"that book is mines"

Some people say that? :shock: My English teacher would have slapped me in the face and sold me to Päivi Räsänen afterwards if I ever even tried to say something like that.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby hlysnan » 2012-05-12, 9:57

It's cutesy.

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby ling » 2012-05-12, 13:38

lumiel wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:"that book is mines"

Some people say that? :shock: My English teacher would have slapped me in the face and sold me to Päivi Räsänen afterwards if I ever even tried to say something like that.

I'm a native speaker of English and I've never heard anyone say "that book is mines". :?

I have heard people say "For reals", but that's a form of slang based on child talk.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Set » 2012-05-12, 13:57

ling wrote:
lumiel wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:"that book is mines"

Some people say that? :shock: My English teacher would have slapped me in the face and sold me to Päivi Räsänen afterwards if I ever even tried to say something like that.

I'm a native speaker of English and I've never heard anyone say "that book is mines". :?

I have heard people say "For reals", but that's a form of slang based on child talk.


I don't know whether it's based on child talk. Here it's not uncommon to hear stuff like: totes (totally), whatevs, anyways, defs/deffers (definitely), obvs (obviously and yeh people actually say that), etc.
People will judge you for speaking like that, obvs. Although I guess most people say it totes ironically.

EDIT: Hmm, surely this started in American English first....
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Meera » 2012-05-12, 17:02

Set wrote:
ling wrote:
lumiel wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:"that book is mines"

Some people say that? :shock: My English teacher would have slapped me in the face and sold me to Päivi Räsänen afterwards if I ever even tried to say something like that.

I'm a native speaker of English and I've never heard anyone say "that book is mines". :?

I have heard people say "For reals", but that's a form of slang based on child talk.


I don't know whether it's based on child talk. Here it's not uncommon to hear stuff like: totes (totally), whatevs, anyways, defs/deffers (definitely), obvs (obviously and yeh people actually say that), etc.
People will judge you for speaking like that, obvs. Although I guess most people say it totes ironically.

EDIT: Hmm, surely this started in American English first....


Oh I can't stand "deffs" "watevs" and etc it drives me crazy. And I cna't stand when girls talk like their stupid, I can't descrbe it, but they talk as if they don't have any brain. I also hate when people say, "Me likes" "Me hungry" or "imma". Or when people try to be funny and talk to me with "thou...thee". Oh and I really hate when people use computer words like LOL and actually say LOL, thats for the computer not in an actually conservation. I was talking to this one girl and she had to go somewhere and said, "BRB." It's fine in an intnert chatroom but when your talking to someone in real life, it sounds rude.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby linguoboy » 2012-05-12, 17:13

Set wrote:Although I guess most people say it totes ironically.

I was kind of floored the first time I heard "totes" used in speech by a coworker. I'm not 100% whether it was ironic or not.

Thing is, I find it's really easy to start out saying something as a joke and then find that it's wormed its way into your ordinary speech. We used to mock one of my classmates by repeating some of the odd things he said; ten years later, I realised I was still saying some of them.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby johntm » 2012-05-12, 17:22

linguoboy wrote:Thing is, I find it's really easy to start out saying something as a joke and then find that it's wormed its way into your ordinary speech.

This.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Set » 2012-05-12, 17:31

Meera wrote: Or when people try to be funny and talk to me with "thou...thee". Oh and I really hate when people use computer words like LOL and actually say LOL, thats for the computer not in an actually conservation. I was talking to this one girl and she had to go somewhere and said, "BRB." It's fine in an intnert chatroom but when your talking to someone in real life, it sounds rude.


The 'thou/thee' thing is the worst, especially if they say something like 'thou goeth' which is just incorrect anyway, but also because they think it makes them sound more posh and formal (albeit in a jokey way), when the thou form is the informal version of 'you'. There are still a few places in the north of England where you can hear this form used a bit and it's definitely not posh/formal.

As for saying 'lol', I definitely used to be of the same opinion as you, but it's so common now it's pointless fighting it...just give in Meera, join us! Join us, lol!
Native:[flag=]en[/flag] Good:[flag=]de[/flag][flag=]ca[/flag] Focusing on:[flag=]fa[/flag][flag=]ku[/flag][flag=]ps[/flag] Interested in:[flag=]zza[/flag][flag=]tr[/flag][flag=]sw[/flag]

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby ffrench » 2012-05-12, 17:54

linguoboy wrote:
Set wrote:I also wouldn't be totally surprised if there were people (not just children) who wrote "could/would/should of" :x

People write that all the time. It's call "reanalysis" and it happens a lot.

I don't know what you mean about "actually pronounc[ing] the 'o' and 'f'". Is of pronounced differently from 've where you are? In American English, they are exactly the same, i.e. /ə(v)/. Using the same "o" in of as you would in, say, off would sound incredibly odd.
I can definitely think of reasons for pronouncing an "o" and not a schwa in of, if it's stressed. It's awkward to stress the schwa in "What of it?" for one.

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Dormouse559 » 2012-05-12, 18:42

What of it? :P I say [ʌ] in that position, so still a different vowel from "off".
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby ling » 2012-05-15, 13:55

Chinese sentences where commas are placed on either side of a "because" clause:

這裡的天空熱鬧因為環境好了鳥會來棲息...
The sky here is bustling [i.e. teeming with activity], because the environment is better [i.e. has improved], birds come to perch...

So, is it:

The sky here is teeming with activity because the environment has improved. Birds come to perch...

or

The sky here is teeming with activity. Because the environment has improved, birds come to perch...
Last edited by ling on 2012-05-16, 2:25, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Bubulus » 2012-05-15, 21:41

Look less at the syntax and more at the pragmatics: the sky can't be bustling simply because the environment is better, we'd just get an empty but clean air. It's the birds that make it bustle. At the same time, causation doesn't have to be direct, and you could indeed say the better environment makes the sky bustle because of the other things it entails. So in the end, it doesn't even matter!

This is exactly what annoys me about people (especially certain English teachers and professors) who dislike "dangling modifiers" (-ing gerund verbal clauses with a subject different from that of the main verb they modify) and even pronouns (!), when it's obvious from the pragmatics (the semantics of the verbs themselves, application of real world knowledge, all sorts of other things including how recent the subject referred to is). Too much (morpho)syntax and not enough pragmatics.

(I'm not saying (morpho)syntax is a waste, it's of course very useful, but it doesn't explain everything. Language isn't commonly used without a context except in language education or in meta-linguistic analyses after all.)

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Lur » 2012-05-18, 12:48

I don't like it when someone compares two languages spoken at the same time and say that one is older than the other. What?
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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby language learner » 2012-05-18, 13:01

Luke wrote:I don't like it when someone compares two languages spoken at the same time and say that one is older than the other. What?

If they are from different language families, e.g. IE and Eskimo-aleut, this is most likely true.

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby Saim » 2012-05-18, 13:05

How can you "quantify" most likely? We have no idea if some of the higher-order language families arose independently or if they all have a common ancestor. A common ancestor seems to make the most 'common sense', so in that case it'd be dead wrong to say that. Although either are just as likely as far as you consider the evidential basis.

Still you can't make factual statements about hypotheticals. I can't say "well this might be true" and then extrapolate a whole other fact from my first conjecture (i.e. some languages may have arisen independently, therefore x family is older than y family).

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Re: Pet Peeves

Postby language learner » 2012-05-18, 13:10

You make a good point. However, unless you assume that there was a proto-human language, which is highly controversial at best at the moment, the odds are that languages in NA and Eurasia emerged at different time.


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